Film Screening & Artist Talk: To Die into a Bird by Anna Kushnerova

To Die into a Bird is a myth whispered by wind and stream, it is an offering to the spirit of Dartmoor’s ancient forest and the brittle body of death. Written and directed by Anna Kushnerova, this 21-minute film unfolds through the voices and movements of earthly folk, spectral guardians, and shape-shifters, choreographed by lichen, granite, and grief.

Emerging from moss-wrapped groves and the fungal breathing of the moor, the story tells of a Bird that eats Human forms. Of coffin roads veined through fern valleys. Of ancestors carried in salt. It is a tale received through place, composted through body, and spoken in the tongue of rot and ritual.

The film traverses death as a sanctuary, a porous zone of shapelessness where we dissolve into canopy, string-of-sausages lichen, and witches’ whiskers. Through decomposition, we trespass the human, reclaiming the kinship between body and cosmos, spirit and soil. Filmed with the participation of local artists, dancers and the ancient earths of Dartmoor.

FREE // All Welcome. Please RSVP via Eventbrite
Monday 23 November 2026
Plymouth Arts Cinema
18:00 - 19:30

Anna Kushnerova is a filmmaker, visual artist, choreographer, and somatic educator, and the founder and director of Human Clay CIC, a Devon-based practice-led arts organisation working across film, performance, ecology, and community participation.

Her interdisciplinary practice spans film, performance, installation, sculpture, and ritual, exploring the body as a site of ecological memory, transformation, and relational knowledge. Rooted in Butoh, eco- somatic practice, and place-responsive research, she creates immersive cinematic and performative worlds where documentary, mythology, movement, and sculptural forms converge. Through collaborations with performers, natural materials, experimental sound, and living landscapes, her work investigates multispecies relationships, metamorphosis, and more-than-human ways of being.

Working with ritual, sensory imagination, and collective participation, Kushnerova develops films, performances, workshops, and participatory projects that invite audiences into dialogue with landscapes, ancestral memory, spirits, and ecological systems. Through Human Clay, she brings together artists, ecologists, craftspeople, and communities to cultivate new relationships between people and the living world, creating spaces where ecological awareness emerges through embodied experience, creativity, and shared acts of listening.